Random Fact Sheet #272 – 35 Surprising Little Facts About the World Around Us

Josef Mengele, a.k.a the Angel of Death, was a Nazi physician who conducted human experiments on prisoners. He escaped Germany and gained a foreign residence permit in Argentina and returned to Germany to visit his family with a passport just 11 years after Nazi Germany fell.

27. In 2009, 107 million spiders were found in a 4-acre spider web at Baltimore wastewater plant in Maryland, USA equating to 35,000 spiders/m³.

28. Former NFL player Robert Rozier who killed 7 people on behalf of a cult, went into the witness protection program, did 22 years in prison, got out, became a web developer, and then was sentenced to 25 years to life for passing $2,200 worth of bad checks.

29. “Fancy Ketchup” is an actual legal designation of the highest grade of ketchup.

30. Some schools in China now have uniforms with tracking devices in them. This is done to monitor student attendance. If students try to leave during school hours, an alarm will go off.

A teenager in France managed to buy a Playstation 4 for only £8 by weighing the console under the fruit and veg section on a self-checkout machine. He was only caught when he tried doing it again.

32. Ted Williams, the last baseball player to bat .400, was at .39955 at the end of the season. Although due to rounding he would have finished with a .400 average, Williams refused to sit out and played the last two games. He went 6 for 8 in those games and finished the season with a .406 average.

33. When a peacock shakes his tail, it produces low pitched sound humans can't hear despite the noise is about as loud as a car going past a few meters away.

34. By 1930 doping was so prevalent and accepted in the Tour de France that the organizers felt compelled to inform the cyclists in the official rulebook that drugs would not be provided.

35. Many people could not figure out how to change the clock time on VCRs. The difficulty of setting the correct time became such a national joke that in 1990 that president Bush remarked “By the year 2000, all Americans must be able to set the clocks on their VCRs.”